The Card

Looking at the video card itself you can see even though the HD 7850 isn't a huge card, Sapphire has managed to apply a really mean looking dual fan cooling solution. You can see we've got a large aluminum heatsink covering it and also a couple of copper heatpipes to help make sure it stays as cool as possible. Considering how cool the HD 7000 series cards have been running, we'll see if this cooler brings some attractive numbers to the table today.

A quick spin around doesn't really hold any surprises. Towards the back you can see we've got a single 6-pin PCIe power connector while if we move across the top you can see we've got a single CrossFire connector which allows us to run up to two of these video cards together in CrossFire.

The I/O side of things is pretty strong with a Dual-Link DVI connector, HDMI port and two Mini DisplayPort connectors. As we saw on the last page when we looked at the bundle we've also got a MiniDP to DP connector in the bundle, which is always a nice addition.

Specifications

As we mentioned in the introduction we're dealing with a pre-overclocked HD 7850 here today from Sapphire. If we were dealing with a reference clocked card you'll find the core comes in at 860MHz while the 2GB of GDDR5 carries a clock of 1200MHz or 4800MHz QDR.

Looking above you can see that Sapphire has bumped both these numbers up with the core getting a 60MHz bump to 920MHz while the 2GB of GDDR5 gets a 50MHz bump which translates to a new memory clock speed of 5000MHz QDR. This is a nice out of the box overclock from Sapphire and should help yield some nice performance numbers today.